


healing is a process (but you're never really fixed)

by hilarions



Category: D.Gray-man
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Past Rape/Non-con, Pedophilia, Psychological Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-30
Updated: 2018-06-30
Packaged: 2019-05-31 03:10:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,067
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15110594
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hilarions/pseuds/hilarions
Summary: Allen was gasping and gasping and gasping for stifled air without a sound but for the heaving of his ragged lungs, and Link figured, dimly, that this might be the sound a tree makes when it falls in a forest, and no one is around to hear.And he couldn’t do a single thing to help but sit there and watch. Watch over him. Stand testament to the quiet crescendo of the pain he carried inside him.He’d never felt quite so useless in his life.





	healing is a process (but you're never really fixed)

**Author's Note:**

> i always said id never write a rape fic, and its for the exact same reason that i wrote this.
> 
> a few hours after writing it, as if the world really is just trying to prove a point, i found out a very good friend of someone close to me was raped that night. as i was writing this story about how the scars of sexual abuse DONT heal and never do, she was being raped. 
> 
> think about that.

* * *

  _My friend told me of a secret_  
_Told me that she blamed herself_

* * *

_Would you blame your little sister  
If she cried to you for help?_

* * *

 

 

It was sometime late at night, pushing the boundaries into early morning, that Link woke to a throat so dry it was painful. Dry breaths wishing through half-sleep for dreams to return skated across the cracked pavement and he tried for some minutes to sate the hateful thirst without opening his eyes by simply gathering saliva beneath his tongue and swallowing it down. 

It didn’t help - didn’t get halfway past the back of his tongue before evaporating. 

Hazy with sleep-addled reluctance, he cracked open an eye and reached for the glass at his bedside table, propped himself up on his elbow so he could bring it to his lips only to find it was empty.

A single drop caught on his lips and his eyes fell closed in weary defeat, set the glass back on the table and tried to savour it for what it was worth. Evaluating his position - already half upright, already half awake, he weighed the options of trying to sleep it off, or dragging himself to the kitchen. 

The longer he thought about it, though, the further out of reach sleep slipped until he didn’t have much choice but to breathe a quiet sigh, pull back the blankets and slip out of bed, toes flinching at the night-cold of the tiles. He took slow steps, making every effort to keep silent, and crept to the kitchen. 

The sound of the faucet pierced his ears in the tentative silence, and he shut it off the moment his glass was almost full enough, because every fraction of a second grated like shards of shattered peace deep in his ears. But the moment the cool water hit his throat, he almost sighed in relief. Worth getting up for, certainly.

In the silence and the near-dark of the kitchen, Link leaned against the counter and savoured his relief, and was roused from dozing placidity by a quiet, wet sort of sniffle. 

Slowly, he breathed the tension from his shoulders and padded across the tiled floor to turn on the light. It stung a bit, and he was blind for a long moment, but there was nothing to be seen when he peeled open his eyes. Cautious, water forgotten on the kitchen bench, he peered around the door into the lounge to find Allen huddled into the furthest corner of the couch. 

Bleary with confusion, Link squinted down at the watch on his wrist. It was quarter past one in the morning, and Allen was sitting in the living room in the dead dark. There was no way he didn’t know Link was there, but he made no motion of greeting, or recognition. 

Link hesitated there, in the junction between confrontation and escape, and found himself stepping into the lounge room before the idea of leaving well enough alone and going back to bed had even formulated into an option in his mind. 

“Hey,” he said, a quiet murmur. Wishing to alert Allen, not startle him. “What are you doing?”

Allen sniffed again, sucked in a sharp, affirming breath and glanced quickly over his shoulder at Link before looking down to evaluate his position with a quiet, unsteady laugh. “Ah,” he said, a short gesture at once capturing the hibernating screen of his laptop on the coffee table as waving the whole question off as nothing. “I was watching a movie.”

“Some time ago,” Link observed, skeptical, and came to stand at the back of the couch. 

Allen couldn’t quite meet his gaze, kept his cheek turned as he rubbed at his eyes. Another unruly laugh, crumbling plaster. “Yeah,” he allowed, pushing himself up a little, in the same movement curling closer into the corner of the sofa. “I must have dozed off,” he reasoned, voice dull with how forcibly lighthearted he coloured his words. He cleared his throat and sniffled again, swallowed thickly. 

Concern drawing his brows together, Link asked, “Are you alright?”

“Fine,” Allen answered, a sharp, jagged laugh forced out of him. It must have sounded fake even to his ears, or perhaps he felt the weight of Link’s skepticism, because he scrubbed the heel of his hand against his eye, a half-hearted effort to hide the glimmer of silent tears that caught on the dim light from the kitchen. “I’m fine,” he repeated, more as though he was trying to convince himself than anything.

Link paused, hesitated. Didn’t know what, exactly, he should be doing. Voice pitched to something like comfort, he asked, “Would you like me to call Tyki?”

“No,” Allen mumbled, still rubbing at his eye as though he could plug away his shameful tears. “I don’t want to explain it.”

“Explain what?” Link asked, his words careful and cautious. 

“You,” Allen said, “calling him in the middle of the night.”

“For  _you-”_ Link started to explain, and was cut off by Allen emphatically shaking his head, dropping back down to tuck himself into the crook of the couch’s arm, where Link had found him.

“I’m fine,” he repeated, determined to let it be true. 

Link pulled in a quiet breath, evaluated his situation. He couldn’t very well leave Allen there. Not in good conscience. No matter how many times he said it, he wouldn’t magically be  _fine._ “If you won’t let me call him,” he allowed, rounding the couch to sit at the other end, “I’ll stay until you  _are_ fine.”

Allen didn’t say anything at all, and Link took that as leave to tuck his feet beneath him and lean in some sort of comfortable discomfort against the opposite arm of the chair. Their silence stretched and stretched, Allen sniffing against his running nose without offering a word of explanation. Perhaps it wasn’t ideal, but Link didn’t know how to talk to him like Tyki did, and holding him was certainly beyond the realm of comfort for comforting a housemate, or friend.

It was heartbreaking, watching the slow crumble of Allen’s fragile stoicism. Over long minutes, watching a glacier crack from an ice shelf and fall to the sea, the pain he was barely holding at bay making his whole body tremble, and then shudder. 

It was impossible to tell when those shudders turned into sharp, silent sobs but for the way he sucked his breaths in sharp and desperate, cracking like something broken in the otherwise silent apartment. Periodic and unsteady, unable to map or anticipate, and dreadful concern crested and broke in Link’s heart when Allen bundled his sleeve to his parted lips to muffle quick, sharp, awful breaths of desperate hyperventilation. 

Gasping and gasping and gasping for stifled air without a sound but for the heaving of his ragged lungs, and Link figured, dimly, that this might be the sound a tree makes when it falls in a forest, and no one is around to hear.

And he couldn’t do a single thing to help but sit there and watch. Watch over him. Stand testament to the quiet crescendo of the pain he carried inside him. 

He’d never felt quite so useless in his life.

At length Allen’s awful breath slowed and calmed, stilled enough for him to pull his face from his sleeve and suck real air into his wearied lungs. At length the plugged tears broke free, and Link could see the mess of them streak across his face. Silvered by the kitchen light. 

He wasn’t a pretty crier. His whole face crumpled with the weight of keeping his tears silent, lips twisted ajar into an ugly grimace, eyes scrunched closed, deep lines of unbearable brokenness etched into his face. 

It was a long, long time before he said anything, silent sobs still shuddering through his whole body. Link wasn’t startled, though. For long minutes his lips seemed to mumble and move until he had enough control over himself to mold them to shape words. 

“You know,” he said, voice barely a whisper and still cracking under the weight of it all, “how they say- they say lightning never strikes in the same place.” 

Link didn’t say anything. Didn’t say a word. He knew - he  _knew_ that whatever Allen had to say, it wasn’t for him. It wasn’t for Link’s benefit, or for his understanding. It was for Allen. It was for Allen, because sometimes there were things that needed to be said. Things that just needed to be heard. In the face of it, he hardly dared breathe.

Allen took his time, couldn’t seem to find words at all, and when he did, a broken laugh tumbled out of him first. “That’s not even scientifically correct,” he said, and curled himself closer into that corner of the couch. “And it hit twice - two times,” he emphasised, another broken laugh falling through ragged breaths, “before I was even old enough to know what it was.”

A cocktail of something like anger and regret and disgust and so many other foul feelings was swirling and mixing, curling into a tight, ugly fist in Link’s chest. This wasn’t just depression. It wasn’t  _just_ depression. Someone had done this to him. 

The futility of Link’s fury was what he hated the most, right then. What good was protectiveness, what good was hatred, when it was years too late. When it was over a decade too late. 

“And I,” Allen started, his voice wavering so terribly it might fall apart at any moment, “I made peace with it, but. No-one,” he said, voice cracking again, and he paused to suck in another too-sharp breath, almost bordering again on that awful panic of being unable to breathe at all. “No-one can promise me,” he persisted, “no-one can say with any certainty, that it’ll never happen again.”

Link wanted to close his eyes. He wanted to close his eyes to it. 

He didn’t let himself. 

Five, ten, fifteen years later, and making peace didn’t mean scars didn’t stay. Making peace didn’t colour the past pretty in rose-tinted glass. Nothing would ever heal him of what truth he was left with, or the lessons he’d been taught. Not time, not happiness, not health, not healing. Not a partner he loved and trusted, not any number of friends who cared. 

Link couldn’t allow himself to close his eyes to that. 

Couldn’t allow himself to presume it too much to bear. Of  _course_ it was. 

Of course it was. 

But that didn’t mean, at the end of the day, that Allen didn’t have to bear it. That he didn’t have to carry the weight of it wherever he went. 

“I’m not crying because there’s anything I need to tell you,” he said, voice muffled, face buried in his arms, pressed into the weave of the couch. “I’m crying because-” he broke off, choked, hiccoughed, pulled in another ragged breath before continuing, “there’s nothing you can say to me. To make me any less scared. And,” he said, sobbed, “Tyki can’t. And he knows about--”  _That._ It. “And he knows he can’t, either.”

He had recovered already, Link understood. He’d healed a long time ago. But all he’d learned - all he’d been taught, was that there was no certainty that he was exempt from the possibility of being put through the same thing all over again. There was no such thing as time done. 

Freshly twenty-two, and there was nothing to say someone wouldn’t choose to rape him tomorrow.

And if they did, who was he to stop them. What could he possibly do to stop them.

And all Link could do - all Link could do for him right then in a moment of barest desolation, of untouchable isolation in the face of knowing that no-one could promise that he would  _always be safe,_ was uncurl himself from his seat, drape a throw rug over his shuddering, curled-up body, heat two cups of milk and set a hot chocolate on the coffee table for him to watch go cool, and then cold, and sit with him until the sun broke the horizon to peek through the curtains and find them slumped against opposite ends of the couch; Allen fast asleep, and Link watching over him.

 

* * *

  _T_ _hey said 'boys will be boys'  
Deaf to the word 'no'_

* * *

_Like a mower in the morning  
I will never let you rest_

* * *

 


End file.
